Week 3

District Attorney Candidate Judge Dolores Carr pins a campaign button on the former Santa Clara County DA, Leo Himmelsbach, left, as they wait for the election returns for the Santa Clara County District Attorney race with her supporters at the Britannia Arms of Almaden, on Tuesday night, June 6, 2006. (LiPo Ching/San Jose Mercury News)

FIELD NOTES

I continued training on the editing desk for two days, and shot the rest of the week. The important issues for me now are getting a basic understanding of how the newsroom works: the processes of meetings, budgets, systems; terms like nutgraphs, booking, lineups sheets, etc.; and how each section (1A, Metro, Sports, Entertainment, etc.) plans their content. I mentioned to Rick at the end of the Photo Desk management class that it would be good to devote a couple of classes to these issues – as a grad student, I didn’t have to take the reporting class, so I possibly missed learning about these things in school. In terms of shooting, I was just working on getting the rust out of my system and getting used to the Canon cameras. On a practical level, I’m continuing to learn Final Cut though I didn’t get a chance to work on any multimedia stories.

The most significant event of the week was the California Primary Elections, on June 6th, 2006, for which the paper devoted a special section. Most all of the photo staff was involved in shooting some aspect of the elections from the state to the local level. I was assigned to Judge Dolores Carr, one of the District Attorney candidates. The section was laid out before I went to shoot, so I knew what the picture requirements were.

The election coverage also included some multimedia pieces, including a video called:
Primary election day: In San Jose, the race for mayor was in the spotlight, but light turnout gave voters plenty of room to decide.
http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/06/primary-election-day/

For multimedia, Geri requested that Richard shoot some video for mercurynewsphoto.com. Based on discussions with Richard after the completed piece was posted, here are some of the issues and processes:

The finished piece needed to be posted by 5pm, to target the after-work night peak in webpage hits on mercurynews.com (hits also peak in the morning before work)

Richard planned his schedule to shoot from 8a-12pm. His subjects included:
1) 3 candidates voting – quick shots
2) A polling station – spent a bit more time for a time-lapse/audio interview bit

After shooting:
1) Digitized 30 minutes of footage
2) Geri watched all 30 minutes of footage, then played with the footage for
another 30 minutes after which she consulted with Richard. According to Richard, Geri isn’t usually as involved with other multimedia pieces, but since this was a bigger and time sensitive story, Geri wanted to supervise the direction as well as get more video training herself as she is in the process of learning video editing.

Not wanting to copy broadcast news, Richard’s inclination was to go more abstract/impressionistic/abstruse, Geri “brought it back to a more journalistic direction.” She wanted to be more evenhanded to all the candidates, which follows the policy of the paper. So even though Richard didn’t shoot all the candidates, they brought in stills of the other people.

It’s also important to note that Richard had no preconceived story or direction from Geri for the video before going out to shoot. One of the clever elements in the piece was the snippets of actual candidate phone calls that Richard recorded from his home phone. I thought the opening time lapse sequence worked well, and was a good example of Richard's multimedia style. The approach to the second part of the piece was more straightforward and I think it tried to accomplish more than it was able -- but I believe this was due to the scope of the subject and the time constraints. In this particular case, it might have been nice to just stay with a smaller, impressionistic take.

Technical issues:
30 minutes of footage was digitized into 5 GB. The final piece was edited down to 2 minutes at 1.3 GB. It was then compressed into a 640x480 movie in 11MB.

According to Richard, aside from this particular case, no one is ever required to produce multimedia, and it’s not even offered as an option on the photo request pull-down menu. Sometimes a reporter or photo editor might suggest a doing multimedia on a story, but it’s never required. Though this week that seems to be changing. The circumstances of Joanne Ho-Young Lee’s Piano Competition preview multimedia piece straddled the request/assignment line (http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/08/piano-competition/) This particular shoot was not even going to be published in the paper. The published story during the final competition was going to refer to the multimedia piece, which was just a preview to the final competition.

Another trend is that sometimes photo editors will see enough pictures in a take to suggest a simple slideshow, even without recorded audio, such as Jim Gensheimer’s Strikeforce (http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/07/strikeforce/). With Soundslides, this process is relatively easy and sometimes the photo editors will do this for the photographers.

This past week, there were about 9 multimedia pieces posted on Mercury News (http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/). Here are my impressions.

AIDS: A Look Back (an interactive retrospective) http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/AIDS_timeline/main.html
Richard designed the Flash show using the graphics from the newspaper and posted a slideshow from photographer Pat Tehan. The retrospective photos are nice and Pat’s Photos are beautiful. The interactivity of the stage design works well but the only issue I might have is that the stage doesn't quite fit on a my computer screen. Again, I think it’s an issue of time and having a fulltime graphics designer assigned to web projects.

Besides Richard, Karen Borchers published a video called Raging Grannies
http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/02/raging-grannies/
I thought this story worked well in video -- a nice, short snippet that captured the essence of the feisty protesters. In a conversation with Karen, she said that she didn’t have any formal trained in video but had always had a movie or video camera that she used personally.

One of the more impressive slideshow pieces was Dai Sugano’s TICKET TO NOVEMBER
http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2006/06/08/ticket-to-november/.
I think the audio narrative from the reporter really helps the viewer lock onto this 8 minute (!) story and the pictures are excellent.

The caveat to the following critique is that one has to realize that many of these slideshows were done as practice and to gain familiarity with the tools and computer interface. I’ve found that many of the audio slideshows that use interviews are a bit confusing to follow, especially when the captions are hidden and the pictures go too fast. I think time for title cards and captions are necessary. The Slideshows interface has some good and bad points. I like that you can start and stop easily and that you can drag the slide to individual pictures, but I don’t like that the captions cover the pictures. For these slideshows I had to view them 2-3 times to fully appreciate the story and pictures. I had to watch the pictures using the slider/pause with captions on, then watch to listen for audio… then maybe once more to really absorb it. It’s probably not the ideal way to view these. Some of the slideshows are also probably not great subjects for an audio slideshow, but again, they were produced more to help the photographer become comfortable with the tools.